To illustrate the joy that I was having one night while sitting at my computer listening to Santana on my iTunes, and to show you some of the techniques that you can use in Photoshop, let’s play with one of my favorite pictures of a group of tulips. And that’s just what I was doing when I created the opening, fanciful image above. So this column is about-you guessed it-having fun in Photoshop.
Most of my photography workshop students have lots of fun taking pictures, but they take the Photoshop side of digital imaging too seriously-striving for the most technically perfect image, and forgetting why they got into digital imaging in the first place. My guess is that you were attracted to digital imaging for the same reason that I and many other photographers were: to have fun and be creative with your photography. RGB, scripts and actions, smart objects, LZW compression, or many of the other cool features and attributes of the world’s most powerful digital image-editing program. In addition, my bet is that you didn’t dive into Adobe Photoshop because you were fascinated with image resolution, CMYK vs. If I had to guess, I’d imagine that you didn’t get into digital photography because you were blown away by how light rays are bent and focused on a camera’s image sensor, or how digital noise can be reduced on a camera’s image sensor (as well as by the camera’s image processor), or how an analog image is translated into ones and zeros.